If you live long enough, you also attend funerals and cremations quite often. Sad gatherings, usually, but sometimes beautiful, occasionally hilarious, and usually deeply moving. Sometimes you think: what an insanely special theatre, more people should experience this. Sometimes people think: we are going to make sure of that.
A year and a half ago, Annet Meijering lost her life partner Jos van Dijk. Their relationship had originated in the North Holland amateur theatre, and ended there. Now, thanks to that amateur theatre, that relationship also lives on. On Sunday 15 March, I attended the performance ‘To begin at the beginning’ by Op Roet, a Hoorn-based production core of what we used to call semi-professional actors, and is now counted as ‘ambitious amateur theatre’.
Studio Noordholland
In ‘To begin at the beginning’, Annet Meijering, with two fellow actors, tells the story of the illness and death of Jos van Dijk, who was diagnosed with Alzheimer's at a relatively young age. Intensely sad story, and because the widow herself acts as narrator, it is extremely personal. But not embarrassingly private. And so that is the special thing about theatre. Even, or perhaps especially, when it is made by ordinary citizens alongside a ‘normal’ job.
Jos van Dijk I knew from before. That's why I was there. After my years as a director and researcher in the then still very lively amateur circuit, I had seen and spoken to him very regularly. Jos was an inspired director who with Studio Noordholland often presented fascinating theatre performances, had founded a youth theatre core and provided education in a province, which had (and still has) very little organised culture outside Amsterdam and Haarlem.
Theatrical characters
That Sunday, when actor Gerard Venverloo was handed a waistcoat by Annet Meijering, a shock went through the matinee hall in Hoorn's Remonstrant Church. That waistcoat, that was Jos. Everyone who had known him knew that, everyone who was just an audience member felt that. That's the power of theatrical characters: even those who don't know them feel them when people around them recognise them. To experience that, you don't have to fly to the other side of the world.
The play ‘To begin at the beginning’ is not a mourning play, but a pure and fragile one that shows the unique power of theatre by people who love it intensely. These aficionados or leisure actors are quite often looked down upon. Completely unjustified, of course, but the fate of this type of amateur theatre runs tragically parallel to Jos van Dijk's syndrome.
Theatre work
In the late 1990s, everything had to change, bureaucratically speaking, and professional support for amateur theatre was thrown into turmoil. Jos van Dijk therefore set to work on a new umbrella organisation, TheaterwerkNL, built on the ruins of what was once the Netherlands Centre for Amateur Theatre. That NCA had seen its best days.
With Theaterwerk, Jos van Dijk brought his own enthusiasm back into governing. Support was given wings. There was repertoire advice, peer-to-peer support: everything to keep the amateur theatre sector moving with society and the development of the professional arts. With knowledge of the interesting mix of tradition, innovation and regional idiosyncrasies that characterise amateur theatre.
Arts Factor
When all that had to merge into the Arts Factor, which is now LKCA has, Alzheimer's struck Jos van Dijk. Quite symbolic. But the LKCA, which has ‘everything to do with amateurs and education’ under its belt, tends to forget things. Or leaves things lying around in its patient archives. And with the elimination of genre boundaries, it also loses the specific knowledge needed for sometimes very specific traditions, in favour of a generalist vision of breadth art.
I'm sure it was a cutback, but as with all cuts, much more was lost than some old junk. Jos van Dijk, whose werdegang is intensely described in the theatrical farewell celebration written by his widow, may stand for a part of our cultural baggage that may not even require a lot of money, but to which we could well pay more attention.
- Experienced: Starting at the beginning by Op Roet. Still to be seen.
- A readable essay on amateur theatre
- Meanwhile, there appears to be a new kind of theatre dome, although the site is not really active yet: Foundation Vision Amateurtheater
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